You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.

So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.